16 MARCH 1962, Page 19

BOOKS

Hall of Fame

By I H. PLUMB

THERE are still two nations, not so distinct now in clothes, accent and divergence of income as they were in Disraeli's day but still utterly separate. For the bulk of the nation—the anonymous—is there any sense in which the past belongs to them? When they go and stare at the Tower, or the monuments in the Abbey, or the tiny, barrel-shaped Victory down in Ports- mouth Dockyard, do they feel that the events they commemorate are still a part of their lives, as integral as their own ancestors? I suspect they are as strange as a Kwakiutl totem or as remote as a Sumerian ziggurat. The British Hall of Fame scarcely belongs to them, but it is real indeed to the other, smaller nation of those who had nannies, prep-schools. dorms, possess colonels and bishops for cousins, and now take tea once a year on the dead and lonely lawns of the Palace

For them, Messrs Batsford's new series will be cosily familiar, full of household names, like Burke and Rhodes and Marlborough, to say nothing of the three under review--William Pitt; William Wilberforce and Samuel Johnson, all good men and true.* The only singular name to stand out, so far, is that of William Caxton, printer. Otherwise all is as it should be : the old roll of honour echoing down the centuries. And, much as we may regret it. these are the heroes of the real nation, of our rulers, of our institutions, and of our public image. And so one can fairly ask what subtlety of mind, what richness of heart brought these men their fame? Or was it guile or luck that brought them honour? Or a beady eye for the main chance? And even more interesting, why lave the ruling classes taken them to their hearts from genera- tion to generation?

'Perhaps the most puzzling choice is Dr. Johnson, about whom Mr. Hodgart writes with real perception This great ugly uncouth bear of a man, in whom so many conflicts raged. secured reputation in his own generation and has never lost it since. True, he is partly the creation of one of the greatest artists of the eighteenth century—James Boswell—but even so, it was the very richness of his personality, as exotic as a carnivorous plant, that trapped that parasitical biographer. Apart from a few schoolboys and' literary critics, who reads Johnson for pleasure now? Hardly anyone. Yet middle-aged men meet regularly in Oslo and Chicago, apart from London and Lichfield, and solemnly junket in Johnson's name. Mr. Hodgart Shows clearly enough the reason, for this-- Johnson has become the epitome of wisdom. His verbal horseplay, his rough manners, and his savagery in argument have been smoothed away by the affectionate hand of time, and his frightening manners, his terrible and blasting sense of guilt, his hungry and jealous love. his

* THE MAKERS OF BRITAIN: SAMUEL JOHNSON by M. J. C. Hodgart. WILLIAM WILBERFORCE by Oliver Warner. WILLIAM Pin by John W. Derry. (Bats- ford, I6s. each.)

corroding sloth and his brutal envy are not only forgiven but forgotten, for the sak of his apothegms that so frequently adorn the miasmic drool of after-dinner speeches.

What is remembered, apart from the sayings, is that he was a vigorous and regula, church- man and a strong Tory, an ardent royalist and a profound believer in the grand law of sub- ordination. The pillars of his belief were, and are, those of the establishment. So his individual eccentricities, even his emotional radicalism, can easily be borne for, in the last resort. John- sonian doctrine is safe and respectable. Yet just how unsafe and unrespectable Johnson could be in his own lifetime, Mr. Hodgart wisely re- minds us. Take this on poverty:

The milder degrees of poverty are, some- times, supported by hope; but the more severe often sink down in motionless dependence. Life must be seen before it can be known. This author [Soame lenyns] and Pope perhaps never saw the miseries which they imagine thus easy to be borne. The poor, indeed, are insensible of many little vexations, which sometimes imbitter the possessions, and pollute the enjoy- ments of the rich They are not pained by casual incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this happiness is like that of a malefactor, who ceases to feel the cords that bind him, when the pincers are tearing his flesh.

He is equally good on the brutality of a soldier's existence, on the plight of negroes; indeed whenever he is touched by human suffering he is clear-eyed and utterly realistic. And the same sharp unconventional wisdom obviously studded much of his conversation. 'Trade could not be managed by those who manage it, if it had much difficulty.' Still true. And so one might go on, with quotation after quotation, to prove the obvious, that in the details of living Johnson's mind moved without self-deceit and without any obeisance to convention. But his radical- ism was emotional and social, not political nor religious, and therefore invigorating without real danger : the ruling class will always find a special place for such men. They may be regarded as quintessentially human, and so domesticated into quaint pets like the dwarfs and buffoons of princely courts. Yet even in my Hall of Fame. I should want Johnson. want him for the wisdom of his heart that he bred so creatively out of his own suffering.

About the other two, I am not so sure. One ought to admire William Wilberforce, and respect William Pitt. It is hard to warm to them, in spite of the dexterity of their latest biographers. Mr. Oliver Warner, a skilful and practised writer, presents an admirable portrait of Wilber- force, based on wide reading and careful, yet sympathetic, judgment. His qualities are obvious enough. Besides his single-minded obsession with the abolition of the slave-trade, which absorbed his energies and his fortune, and led to the rejection of that career as a statesman which was open to him in the heyday of his

friendship with Pitt, he possessed gaiety, charm, obvious sincerity. For my taste, he was too eminently safe, too smug, too vain; concerned with tinkering with one glaring fault in the society to which he belonged without question- ing the injustice of the system itself. Such phil- anthropists are acceptable to any establishment and indeed can be honoured for the largeness of their hearts and the magnanimity of their spirits. And it seems churlish not to agree. Wilberforce did help to stop a major crime against humanity: most politicians are incapable of his single-minded dedication. It is easy to see why, like Johnson, he slipped so easily into the Hall of Fame. Such smugness, however, as his, such vanity, such opacity to the largeness of human suffering makes me want to turn him out. And yet good works, even if achieved through consummate vanity, remain good works.

On William Pitt, however, judgment should be easier. His achievement, set out with real skill in this admirably written biography by John Derry, who possesses all the qualities of a first- class historian, is clear enough. And his position would appear to be safer than Johnson's and Wilberforce's. Indeed, so it will be until, unlikely event, there is a social revolution. He is the symbol of the nation's endurance in its last great fight with France for empire : he was the seeming bulwark against radicalism and revo- lution. He made eighteenth-century society safe as well as prosperous. So all may be forgiven—the failure of his seemingly liberal intentions, his drunkenness, his debts (rarely mentioned about Pitt, always underlined with poor Charles James Fox) and the vain, aloof, unimaginative spirit, cold and egocentric, that lusted for little but power and moved with such practised ease in its corridors.

From his strange, distracted father, however, he inherited one gift that bordered on genius— a rhetoric that could hypnotise. Yet, his most consummate ability was his instinctive know- ledge of how to polarise the fears of men and give them the courage to trust him to repel their dangers. His, however, was merely a holding action; yet a remarkable one, for the social forms which he defended lingered on, ghost- like, well into the twentieth century. That is why, though he thought of himself as a Whig, he is regarded as a founder of the Conservative Party : a most proper destiny for a maker of the nation.

Let us hope Messrs. Batsford will find room, as the series develops, for some of the true liberals, men such as Tom Paine or even Jeremy Bentham, whose ideas have helped to make life tolerable for the other nation that exists but does not rule.